FROM INTEGRALPOST
PART 1: INTEGRAL THINKING
IN CUTTING-EDGE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY | REPRINTED
YES, VIRGINIA, CONSCIOUSNESS DOES
GO ALL THE
WAY DOWN!
August 6th, 2012
Although the apparent confirmation of the Higgs Boson, the socalled God particle, has been attracting attention recently, the most
vexing problem in science and philosophy remains the mind-body
problem: What relation is there between material brain states and
conscious, first-person experience? In the past few years, as we shall
see in a moment, some neurosciences have now arrived at an
answer that was anticipated by Ken Wilber’s version of integral
theory. According to Wilber, meager versions of interiority—the
antecedents of consciousness—are found at the atomic level, as
Alfred North Whitehead suggested in the early 20th century.
For much of the 20th century, however, in part because of the
enormous influence of behaviorism, consciousness was not even
considered a fit topic for natural and social science. Until relatively
recently, natural science maintained that consciousness is a late
arriving, highly improbable, and accidental phenomenon belonging
solely to humans. Animals were not considered conscious. Possession
of self-consciousness, a trait that humans have developed to an
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exceptional degree, is regarded as at best a mixed blessing. While
making possible knowledge that allows for some control of nature,
consciousness also makes humans aware of their mortality and
eventually of their absurdity in a godless universe, bereft of any
significance apart from the pathetic prattling of utterly insignificant
humans on a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere. In the face of this
nihilistic view, we are encouraged to keep a stiff upper lip while
leading a life “as if” it really meant anything.
In the past few decades, however, many neurophysiologists have
concluded that we can infer that any organism with sufficient neural
complexity has some measure of consciousness. Many researchers
now believe that no account of human “mind” could be complete
without explaining the nature and possibility of first-person
experience. This re-awakened interest in consciousness occurred in
the context of narratives about cosmic evolution from its birth in the
Big Bang. According to the so-called anthropic principle (better put,
the life principle), organic life could have evolved only if the basic
laws of the universe were extraordinarily finely tuned to be life
friendly. Holmes Rolston III has written that if the first Big Bang was the
explosion from which space-time and matter-energy emerged, and
if the second Big Bang was the emergence of organic life, then
the third Big Bang was the development of consciousness. More
than a few respected scientists and philosophers maintain that
perhaps it is no accident that self-conscious life evolved; indeed,
perhaps the universe has become conscious of itself through
humankind.
Consciousness may be an emergent phenomenon that showed up
12 billion years after the first Big Bang. Yet, an even more striking
possibility is that proto-consciousness came into being along with
other basic cosmic constituents shortly after the Big Bang
occurred. Consciousness would then not be an accidental “add
on” that never quite fits in a material universe, but instead would be
a primary feature of the universe that occurs at all levels of
reality, right down to that of quarks.
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The Four Quadrants
One of the most significant recent contributions to this view of
consciousness has been made by Christof Koch and Guilio Tononi.
In Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press,
2012), Koch lays out the elements of their “integrated information
theory “ (ITT) of consciousness. Koch, a professor of biology and of
engineering at Cal Tech, and chief science officer at the recently
established Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, is a worldrenowned neuroscientist. For almost twenty years, Koch worked
closely with Nobel laureate Francis Crick on the problem of
consciousness. Despite coming up with one or another wellgrounded account of what neurophysiological structures and
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functions were involved in generating consciousness, Koch and Crick
were not able to explain exactly how the magichappened, that is,
how first-person conscious experiences arose with or were correlated
with those complex structures and functions.
After Crick’s death, Koch began with working with Tononi, another
brilliant brain-consciousness researcher, who postulated that
information theory could shed light on consciousness. In their
accessible co-authored essay, “Can Machines Be Conscious?” Koch
and Tononi write: “Information is classically defined as the reduction
of uncertainty that occurs when one among many possible
outcomes is chosen.” Relatively simple systems can be in an
astonishing number of states, but such systems do not achieve
consciousness because those states are not integrated. “According
to IIT, consciousness implies the availability of a large repertoire of
states belonging to a single integrated system. To be useful, those
internal states should also be highly informative about the world.”
Achieving high levels of integration in neural networks is
difficult.1 “The more integrated and differentiated the system is, the
more conscious it is.”2
ITT “not only specifies the amount of consciousness, Φ, associated
with each state of a system. It also captures the unique quality of
that experience.” Hence, “A nervous network in any one particular
state has an associated [correlated] shape in qualia [experiential]
space.” For humans, the neural network state and the correlated
experiential state are extraordinarily complex, as they would have to
be in order to account for the manifold ways in which people can
be conscious. Koch uses the term “crystal” to describe a physical
system that is “mapped onto a shape in this fantastically
multidimensional qualia space.” Each conscious experience involves
its own topology, which allows for different experiences: seeing
green vs. seeing red.
Although correlated with neural (that is, material) states,
consciousness is not reducible without remainder to such
states. Eliminative materialism is the term of art for the kind of
reductionism that says there are only brain states and thus that
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consciousness is nothing but brain states. In contrast, Koch adheres
to a sophisticated version of what philosopher David Chalmers has
called the dual-aspect theory of reality. There are material
phenomena and conscious phenomena, neither of which can be
reduced to the other, although they are closely correlated.
Corresponding to the mathematical complexity of the material
system is the geometrical complexity of the experiencing crystal.
“The crystal is the system viewed from within. It is the voice in the
head, the light inside the skull.”
The [experiential] crystal is not the same as the underlying network of
mechanistic, causal interactions, for the former is phenomenal
experience whereas the latter is a material thing. [ITT] postulates two
sorts of properties in the universe that can’t be reduced to each
other—the mental and the physical. They are linked by way of a
simple yet sophisticated law, the mathematics of integrated
information.
According to Koch, this law will make possible development of a
“consciousness-meter.”
This gadget takes the wiring diagram of any system of interacting
components, be it wet biological circuits or those etched in silicon,
to assess the size of that system’s conscious repertoire. The
consciousness-meter scans the network’s physical circuitry, reading
out its activity level to compute Φ and the crystal shape of the
qualia that the network is momentarily experiencing. A geometrical
calculus will need to be developed to determine whether the crystal
has the morphology of a painfully stubbed toe or of the scent of a
rose under a full moon.
As indicated by his reference above to circuits in wetware or silicon,
Koch adheres to a kind of functionalism with regard to
consciousness. That is, what counts is not what the system is made of,
but whether it functions in a way that makes possible integrated
information. Always arising with such integrated information is some
measure of interiority. That is to say, the universe is constituted by a
hierarchy of integrated systems that not only have an exterior but an
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interior as well. The universe is conscious—that is, has some measure
of experience or interiority--all the way down. According to Koch,
Any system whose functional connectivity and architecture yield a Φ
value greater than zero has at least a trifle of experience. This holds
not only for the biochemical and molecular structures of organic
cells, but “also encompasses electronic networks made out of solidstate devices and copper wires.
No matter what a thing is composed of, whether it is an organism or
rolls on wheels:
If it has both differentiated and integrated states of information, it
feels like something to be such a system; it has an interior
perspective. The complexity and dimensionality of their associated
phenomenal experiences might differ vastly, but each one has its
own crystal [interior] shape.
[…] Even simple matter has a modicum of Φ. Protons and neutrons
consist of a triad of quarks that are never observed in isolation. They
constitute an infinitesimal integrated system.
With the rise of digital artifacts in the past few decades, vast
numbers of low-level centers of interiority were added to that of
trillions of organisms on planet Earth. When isolated computers and
smart phones are tied together in the Internet, the level of integrated
complexity attained suggests that the Internet is already conscious
at some level. Koch and Tononi are confident that humans will
eventually be able to create conscious artificial intelligence (AI),
although AI consciousness will not necessarily have all the features
associated with and required by the human form of consciousness.
In his book, Koch bravely steps out in a way rarely done by many
neuroscientists. He asserts that he adheres to a version of
panpsychism, because he holds that consciousness is “a
fundamental feature of the universe, rather than emerging out of
simpler elements….” (132) Koch praises Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a
name that rarely appears in the context of neurophysiology (!), for
having affirmed a version of panpsychism in his famous book, The
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Phenomenon of Man. The evolution of humankind makes possible
the rise of the noosphere, a new layer of reality that covers planet
Earth with “incandescence,” Teilhard writes. Koch takes seriously
Teilhard’s speculation that the Omega Point will be achieved “when
the universe becomes aware of itself by maximizing its complexity, its
synergy.” At this point, Koch notes that ITT goes beyond panpsychism
in attempting to specify the causal processes involved in integrating
information. Moreover, he concedes that ITT has a long way to go
before being considered a “final” theory of consciousness, but it is a
good start in that direction.
Koch is a reductionist because he believes that science will
ultimately comprehend what gives rise to consciousness and will be
able to create machines that are conscious. Consciousness does not
come from some otherworldly source. He is a romantic reductionist
because of his on-going interest in the spiritual dimensions of
reality. He writes: “I’m optimistic that science is poised fully to
comprehend the mind-body problem. To paraphrase from
Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a laboratory darkly, but then
we shall know.’”
Raised Roman Catholic, Koch took his faith seriously for many years,
although he finally abandoned it because he could not square
Christianity’s mythic content with scientific knowledge. In the final
chapter of his book, Koch respectfully explores the limitations of
Biblical religion and theism in general, but he is unwilling to surrender
his surmise that there is something profound at work in the cosmos,
something signifying more than the intense interactions of matterenergy. In effect, Koch is his way to being an integral theorist. In
affirming the interiority of all levels of reality, he wants to leave open
the possibility of a mysterious depth to the origins and consequences
of the universe. Just before concluding his book with a psalm from
the Dead Sea Scrolls, Koch waxes philosophically:
I do believe that some deep and elemental organizing principle
created the universe and set it in motion for a purpose I cannot
comprehend. I grew up calling this entity God. It is much closer to
Spinoza’s God than to the God of Michelangelo’s painting. The
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mystic Angelius Silesius, a contemporary of Descartes, captures the
paradoxical essence of the self-caused Prime Mover as “Gott ist ein
lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier.” (God is a lucent nothing,
no Now nor Here can touch him.)
Koch’s religious roots must have played some role in his openness to
developing a sophisticated version of panpsychism. Nevertheless, he
arrived at this position by way of lengthy, careful scientific research.
This fact indicates that the integral Zeitgeist is gaining in influence, if
by “integral thinking” we mean the view that consciousness starts all
the way down and then proceeds to go all the way up via cosmic
evolution.
The title of this essay promises a lot: There is consciousness all the way
down. Koch has not proven this, as he is well aware. In Part Two of
this post, I take a more critical look at current developments in AI
and consciousness research. In his excellent new book, You Are Not
a Gadget, Jaron Lanier—a key player in development of virtual
reality in the 1980s—warns that researchers in Silicon Valley are
redefining AI in a way that both changes and lowers the bar for
what counts as machine “consciousness.” In the process, those gurus
are encouraging us to lower our own mental capacities to comply
with what all those seductive (but limited) gadgets can do.
According to Lanier, leaders in Silicon Valley are using their profits not
merely to line their pockets or to invest in better digital consumer
goods, but primarily to enable the emergence of a self-conscious
Internet via hive mind or to bring about some other form of AI that
goes well beyond human intelligence. Here, we may ponder the
adage: Be careful of what you wish for!
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http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/can-machines-be-conscious/
According to Koch, “Leibniz would have been very comfortable with integrated information.”
Leibniz, the 17th century German polymath and co-inventor (with Newton) of the calculus,
postulated that the world is constituted by complex and integrated matrices of monads, or
centers of experience. In human beings, a dominant monad integrates the contributions of
countless other monads operating at various levels.
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